1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method, system, and program for ordering search results using an importance rating and, in particular, using user bookmark data to determine the importance rating.
2. Description of the Related Art
To locate documents on the Internet, users typically use an Internet search engine. Internet users enter one or more key search terms which may include boolean operators for the search, and transmit the search request to a server including a search engine. Search engines include a spider program or crawler that periodically visits web pages, searches the Internet to locate new web pages, and revises previously located sites to look for changes. The spider then places information from the pages it locates into a database index which relates URLs to search terms.
Search engines can index various information from located pages to associate with the URL of each page. For example, many search engines index the full body of visible text, but may exclude commonly used words, e.g., xe2x80x9cthexe2x80x9d, xe2x80x9candxe2x80x9d, etc. Search engines may also index keywords included in a special keyword meta tag in the document that holds key words the page designer designates to use for searching purposes. Search engines may include alternative text associated with images and perform word stemming to include variations of a word, e.g., politics, politician, political, etc. as keywords to include in the index. The keywords indexed for a particular URL are then searched when a user enters the keywords for a search. The results of a search include all URLs having indexed words that match the search term and any specified boolean search operators.
The response to a query is often determined by how keywords are indexed for a URL. In author-controlled search engines, the search engine providers allow the document author to designate the indexed keywords by specifying such words in the document. However, author oriented search engines provide document authors the opportunity to include misleading words in the meta tags to cause the search engine to return the document in response to searches unrelated to the document content. Other search engine providers use an editor-controlled approach, where the search engine provider employs editors to manually catalog web sites and the indexed keywords that will be used in searching. However, editor-controlled search engines can result in irrelevant search results if the editors associate the wrong keywords with the URL or exclude highly relevant key words from the URL/key word association.
A search engine may locate numerous search results in response to a user search query, many of which may not be relevant. One problem search engine developers must address is the order in which to present the search results. Most search engines use the location and frequency of keywords on a web page as the basis of ranking search results. After obtaining multiple URL search results, search engines may order the URL search results based on the number of search keywords included in the meta description and keywords tag for the page of each URL search result. A search engine can also order the URL search results based on the number of pages and/or number of important web pages that include hypertext links to the URL search result page. In both such cases, the search engine is assigning some importance weighting to each returned search result to determine the order in which the URL search results will be presented to the user.
To improve how results are presented, one search engine company, Direct Hit, has developed algorithms to rank search results according to the popularity of the site. The Direct Hit search engine anonymously monitors which web sites Internet searchers select from the search results list, how much time the searchers spend at these sites and other metrics. The sites that are selected by searchers are boosted in their ranking, while the sites that are consistently ignored by searchers are penalized in their rankings.
One disadvantage for ranking the popularity of web sites based on the pages a user selects and reviews is that in many cases Internet users may view a page inadvertently or accidentally without having any real interest in the content of the page. For instance, Internet users may select an advertisement to view the advertisers""s page to take xe2x80x9ca quick lookxe2x80x9d to only determine that the page is of no interest and immediately return to the previously viewed page or another page. For this reason, ranking search results based on the number of hits a page receives may boost the ranking of pages that are not particularly important to the Internet user.
For this reason, there is a need in the art for a methodology for ranking web pages that considers the importance of web pages to a user.
To overcome the limitations in the prior art described above, preferred embodiments disclose a method, system, and program for providing, accessing, and using bookmark data to supplement information in a search engine database. The bookmark data indicates saved user selected network addresses, e.g., URLs, that are capable of being selected to access observable data, e.g., a page of text, images, sound file, movie file, etc., at the selected network address.
In the preferred embodiments, a user computer may receive user modifications to bookmark data and transmit the modifications to the bookmark data to a server over a network, wherein the transmitted bookmark data is used to order indexed network addresses in a search engine database. In further embodiments, the user may register for a service over the Internet to provide bookmark data to the server and, in response, receive an application program over the Internet from the server in response to registering for the service. The application program would execute at the user program to receive modifications to the bookmark data and transmit the modifications to the server.
In the preferred embodiments, a server may gather bookmark data indicating saved user selected network addresses that the user is capable of selecting to access observable data at the selected network address. The server registers Internet users over the Internet for a service and transmits over the Internet an application program to execute at computers of registered users connected to the Internet. The server receives from the application program executing on the user computers connected to the Internet bookmark data from the users.
In the preferred embodiments, a search engine server uses bookmark data gathered from multiple Internet users indicating saved user selected network addresses. The user may select the saved network address to access the observable data, such as a page of text, images, sound file, movie file, etc., at the selected network address. The search engine server maintains an index of network addresses and at least one keyword associated with each network address. User observable data is maintained at the page at the network address.
The search engine server receives bookmark data gathered from multiple Internet users and determines an importance rating for at least one network address from the received bookmark data. The determined importance rating is included in the search engine index. Further, when executing a search query against the index to determine at least one search result, the search engine server presents the search results ordered according to their importance rating.
Preferred embodiments provide a technique for determining user indicated importance of web pages from the user""s bookmark selection of URL web pages. Preferred embodiments provide a method, system, and program for transmitting the bookmark data and any modifications thereto to a bookmark data gatherer server. Preferred embodiments also provide an Internet service managed by a bookmark data gatherer to gather bookmark data from multiple Internet users. The bookmark data is then used by a search engine server to determine an importance rating for URL entries in the search engine URL index based on bookmark entries for the URL. For instance, the importance weight may increase for a URL added to a bookmark file and decrease for a URL removed from a bookmark file. Further, user selection of classification terms in the bookmark file may be used to supplement the search keywords for the URL as the classification term represents a user description of the bookmarked URL.
In this way, preferred embodiments provide a technique for translating subjective user preferences for web pages as indicated in the user bookmark file into an importance rating of the URL. This importance rating may then be used to order URLs returned in response to a search request to present to the searcher the results in the order of subjective importance to Internet users.